I call this the possession glitch because Thunderbird acts as if a remote user is possessing it and clicking on things: Menus start opening on their own and scrolling by themselves. So far TB is the only program I’ve seen doing this particular thing; I’m curious if anyone else experiences it as I have for several months.
What happens: Roughly a few hours after logging in and keeping Thunderbird minimized in the background, I find that entries in the tree list to the left (eg: Inbox) start opening on their own as if I clicked on the arrow to expand them. Even worse, putting the mouse cursor over the window causes it to randomly scroll down… the scrolling doesn’t happen consistently, it just scrolls a little bit as I move the pointer around. The issue goes away when I close and reopen TB and doesn’t occur again until the next restart.
While at first this seemed like an unrelated issue, I noticed another problem that appears to follow the same pattern. This time with Discord: When I bring the window up and put the mouse cursor over it, Discord acts as if I’m dragging a file even when I’m not, the screen is covered with a “drop here to upload file” notice until I restart the program. Just like the menus moving by themselves in Thunderbird, this too happens a few hours after the first login and won’t occur again until I reboot.
I don’t know if this is Plasma related but am presuming that’s likely: It’s been going on for a long time since Manjaro was on Plasma 5, now that we’ve been upgraded to Plasma 6 it will still take place. If both issues are the same thing, I suspect something in KDE or Wayland is confusing applications into thinking a file is being dragged.
Sounds more like some kind of mouse button input problem than anything to do with Thunderbird or KDE. I have TB running all day every day on Plasma for the last 2.5 years, minimized most of the time, and have never seen anything like that.
Are you using a mouse or a touchpad? Post output of sudo libinput list-devices.
You could try sudo libinput debug-gui or sudo libinput debug-events next time it happens and see if you notice anything strange happening with mouse buttons.
See also libinput - ArchWiki and the libinput documentation.
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Interesting. Normal mouse and keyboard, nothing special that I’m aware of. Nothing like this happens outside of those particular applications and moments either: Any real issue with mouse or keyboard would be far more noticeable.
Device: Power Button
Kernel: /dev/input/event1
Group: 1
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: keyboard
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: n/a
Nat.scrolling: n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: none
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: n/a
Rotation: 0.0
Device: Power Button
Kernel: /dev/input/event0
Group: 2
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: keyboard
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: n/a
Nat.scrolling: n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: none
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: n/a
Rotation: 0.0
Device: REDRAGON Live Camera: REDRAGON
Kernel: /dev/input/event22
Group: 3
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: keyboard
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: n/a
Nat.scrolling: n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: none
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: n/a
Rotation: 0.0
Device: USB Optical Mouse
Kernel: /dev/input/event2
Group: 4
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: pointer
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: disabled
Nat.scrolling: disabled
Middle emulation: disabled
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: button
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: flat *adaptive custom
Rotation: 0.0
Device: Razer Razer Ornata V3 X
Kernel: /dev/input/event3
Group: 5
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: keyboard
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: n/a
Nat.scrolling: n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: none
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: n/a
Rotation: 0.0
Device: Razer Razer Ornata V3 X Keyboard
Kernel: /dev/input/event4
Group: 5
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: keyboard pointer
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: n/a
Nat.scrolling: disabled
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: none
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: n/a
Rotation: 0.0
Device: Razer Razer Ornata V3 X
Kernel: /dev/input/event6
Group: 5
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: pointer
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: disabled
Nat.scrolling: disabled
Middle emulation: disabled
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: button
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: flat *adaptive custom
Rotation: 0.0
Device: Eee PC WMI hotkeys
Kernel: /dev/input/event8
Group: 6
Seat: seat0, default
Capabilities: keyboard
Tap-to-click: n/a
Tap-and-drag: n/a
Tap drag lock: n/a
Left-handed: n/a
Nat.scrolling: n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration: n/a
Scroll methods: none
Click methods: none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles: n/a
Rotation: 0.0
This issue continues to occur: Some 15 - 60 minutes after the first login, Thunderbird will always experience this effect, which I won’t see again until rebooting after restarting TB.
I tried sudo libinput debug-gui and sudo libinput debug-events while the problem was happening, they don’t indicate any inputs being triggered when they shouldn’t be, hardware wise everything is fine. I noticed that even if the window isn’t selected and active, moving the cursor over another window in the foreground causes Thunderbird to still act up.
Since there’s nothing super private in my emails, I decided to record a quick capture of what’s happening. What you see in this short clip is me simply moving the mouse cursor around: I am not touching the mouse wheel nor clicking any buttons neither on the mouse or keyboard, just moving the pointer over the window… the scrolling and expanding entries are happening on their own.
https://i.imgur.com/NItuavz.mp4